Quotes from Alice Roberts

Later, I found it too hard to give up, and so I've continued eating fish and other seafood, while trying to ensure it's sustainably sourced. This means I'm now one of those vegetarians I used to frown at - one who occasionally eats fish.

Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.

Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.

It is so stimulating for young children to hear someone who does science talking about it. It can be so exciting and inspiring. It is easy to get younger school children enthused about science.

Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out.

I've seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.

More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.

So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people's lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.

The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.

I'm strict about taking nuts and dried fruit with me and, if I have access to milk, small packets of porridge to eat in a break.

Look what consumer power has done with organic food; we can do the same with clothes.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.

Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it's also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit - and then it's gone.

The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there's a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.

After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.

It's tempting to look back into history with rose-tinted glasses. Most people in the Stone Age didn't live anywhere near as long as we're living now. Today we can enjoy a more wide-ranging diet and we have fruit and vegetables available all year round.

I was a fairly strict vegetarian - I ate eggs and dairy products but nothing that would involve killing an animal to furnish the food on my plate.

When I was in my 20s, and even though I was studying medicine, I didn't ever really think that my body would fail. Now I'm in my 40s, I have to face a different reality - I, like everyone else, am slowly falling apart.

The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you're allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.

But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that's really important.

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.